We were lucky to catch up with Timothy Campbell recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Timothy , thanks for joining us today. Would you say you are more focused on growing revenue or cutting costs? We’d love to hear how you think about these two critical drivers

Growing and sustaining a business is a financial tightrope walk. You want your revenue to grow, but that is not always the reality and cutting costs may be necessary to sustain and ultimately grow revenue. But cutting costs isn’t necessarily a bad thing! It’s sort of like trimming split ends for healthy hair lol. I think what’s most important is identifying where to trim without significantly impacting your business model and quality of service. Those negotiable areas may even become strengths rather than weaknesses. For example, launching and bootstrapping my eyewear company @emberniche pre-pandemic was costlier than I originally thought. Between website, product, advertising for a new company, the cost of producing video and photo content consistently was draining my wallet and I could not afford to consistently pay photographers. My solution was to create content with film equipment from eBay aka DIY. While still an expense and not as high quality as professional photography, visual content became much less expensive, and I had a lot more control over when and how visual content was created. That autonomy allowed me to get out more with less, ultimately leading to revenue growth. Again, it’s like trimming split ends for healthy hair and isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Be creative, make it sexy like a bob or a bang lol. The important thing is to identify where those opportunities are.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m co-founder of Ember Niche Eyewear, an independant eyewear brand specializing in bold colorful eyewear shapes and designs. I’ve always loved fashion, footwear and accessories but my love for eyewear came when I got my first pair of prescription glasses in 2014. Not long after, me and one of my closest friends from childhood launched in Ember Niche Eyewear in 2017. We joined the independent market to design and produce glasses in the shapes that larger more ubiquitous companies were afraid of.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

My business partner and I met through a mutual friend back in 2009 during High School. Ironically, the actual setting we. met at was a Fashion Show hosted at Fashion Industries High School. He had on the Blue and Green Ken Griffey Air Max’s before they came out and I’m like “bro those are fire” lol. We became cool and 9 years later we would launch an eyewear company.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

I personally believe one of the pillars of a good team is alignment. More specifically alignment on a specific vision and goal for everyone both personal and professional. Even if everyone doesn’t have the same goals here a definitely some overlaps and that is key to unlocking intrinsic motivation in everyone.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.emberniche.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/emberniche
• Twitter: twitter.com/emberniche

Image Credits
Joshua Scott, Leaf Parks, Soup, & Vicki Lewis